Collapse awareness in the face of climate breakdown and urbicide

Abstract

ABSTRACT ‘Collapse awareness’ is a complex attunement to a radically insecure present and future that reaches beyond known logics of security such as prevention, resilience, or preparedness. Bringing together two very different empirical fields – planetary ecological destruction and the urbicide taking place in the war in Ukraine – the article introduces collapse awareness as a particular form of situational awareness that is concerned with the existential loss of living environments in the Anthropocene. We analyse intellectual and activist interventions in the face of the ecological crisis, on the one hand, and the everyday and aesthetic forms of dealing with the ongoing shelling of urban architecture and infrastructure, on the other. Working through these two fields of attention we propose five overarching temporal and affective features of collapse awareness in the face of existential destruction: how it moves beyond known security rationales in its grappling with radical insecurity; how it attaches itself to ‘truth’ in particular ways; how it responds to the violence of the Anthropocene; how it evokes a ‘we’ that has yet to be formed; and how it negotiates despair and hope in the face of catastrophic ruin.